Michael Sullivan

Carolyn Jensen

Michael Sullivan is NPR's Senior Asia Correspondent. He moved to Hanoi to open NPR's Southeast Asia Bureau in 2003. Before that, he spent six years as NPR's South Asia correspondent based in but seldom seen in New Delhi.

Michael was in Pakistan on 9-11 and spent much of the next two years there and in Afghanistan covering the run up to and the aftermath of the U.S. military campaign to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda. Michael has also reported extensively on terrorism in Southeast Asia, including both Bali bombings. He also covered the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Michael was the first NPR reporter on the ground in both Thailand and the Indonesian province of Aceh following the devastating December 2004 tsunami. He has returned to Aceh more than half a dozen times since to document the recovery and reconstruction effort. As a reporter in NPR's London bureau in the early 1990s he covered the fall of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Before moving to New Delhi, Michael was senior producer on NPR's foreign desk. He has worked in more than 60 countries on five continents, covering conflicts in Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Chechnya, and the Middle East. Prior to joining the foreign desk, Michael spent several years as producer and acting executive producer of NPR's All Things Considered.

As a reporter, Michael is the recipient of several Overseas Press Club Awards and Citations for Excellence for stories from Haiti, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. He was also part of the NPR team that won an Alfred I DuPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of 9-11 and the war in Afghanistan. In 2004 he was honored by the South Asia Journalists Association (SAJA) with a Special Recognition Award for his 'outstanding work' from 1998-2003 as NPR's South Asia correspondent.

As a producer and editor, Michael has been honored by the Overseas Press Club for work from Bosnia and Haiti; a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for a story about life in Sarajevo during wartime; and a World Hunger Award for stories from Eritrea.

Michael's wife, Martha Ann Overland, is Southeast Asia correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education and also writes commentaries on living abroad for NPR. They have two children.

Michael is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He's been at NPR since 1985.

Philippine lawyer Jude Sabio doesn't get out much these days — not after he accused his country's enormously popular president, Rodrigo Duterte, of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

"Nowadays I do not go out so much in public places," Sabio says. "Specifically, I'm afraid that I'll be killed at any time. Somebody will be just coming and pump a bullet into my head."

Last month, at a Cabinet function on the lawn of Bangkok's Government House, deputy prime minister and defense minister Prawit Wongsuwan made a simple gesture: He raised his arm to shield his eyes from the sun.

537,000: That's the number of Rohingya who have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh in the past seven weeks, according to the U.N.

It's the largest migration of people in Asia in decades. The Rohingya are fleeing a campaign of terror by the Myanmar military and Buddhist vigilantes, something the U.N. has called the world's "fastest developing refugee emergency" and a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing."

In the early morning hours of of Aug. 25, Abul Kalam, a bearded, 35-year-old Muslim religious teacher, was sitting in his village in Myanmar's Maungdaw township when the call came.

"Our commander ordered us to attack the military post in our village," he says.

So he did, along with about 150 other men, he says. All were members of Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority, and many were volunteers recruited by a Rohingya militant group to fight against security forces.

Cambodia needs energy. Almost half of this Southeast Asian country is without electricity. Work will soon be completed on the country's largest hydropower project to date, the Sesan 2 dam, on the Sesan River, a tributary of the Mekong River near the border with Laos.

The dam is an $800 million joint Chinese-Cambodian venture from a company called Hydro Power Lower Sesan 2 Co. Ltd. When it's finished, two nearby villages, Srekor and Kbal Romeas, will be underwater.

The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, celebrates his first year in office Friday. Since becoming president, he has picked a fight with former President Obama, cursed out the Pope, joked about raping women and declared his "separation" from the United States to pursue a more independent foreign policy with new friends China and Russia.

But none of that really matters at home.

What does matter is that Duterte ran for president promising a brutal, bloody war on drugs. And he's delivered.

She has no phone, no laptop, no Internet and no air conditioning inside her cell. It's 93 degrees outside, but Leila de Lima looks remarkably composed.

The Philippine senator spends much of her time reading and attending to Senate business as best she can, though she isn't allowed to vote. De Lima, a 57-year-old grandmother, was imprisoned in February on President Rodrigo Duterte's orders, after poking the bear one too many times. The charges against her, which she denies, include taking money from jailed drug dealers.

The Cambodian government owes the United States about $500 million for a food loan taken out during the Vietnam War. Cambodia says it's not paying. The United States says a loan is a loan. Michael Sullivan has more from Phnom Penh.

The beautiful beaches of Teknaf, along the Bay of Bengal in southern Bangladesh, are almost completely untouched by humans. Wide, with fine-grained brown and gray sand, the shore looks as if it stretches along the sea forever. In fact, the Bangladeshi government bills it as the world's longest beach.

So naturally, developers are lining up to build there and have literally staked out their claims on signs along the road, Marine Drive. When the highway is finished, it will link this place to Cox's Bazar some 50 miles to the north.

With her 8-year-old son's head resting in her lap, Zubaida was sitting at home with some other women from her village in western Myanmar's Rakhine state when the military came — and the gunfire started.

"All the men from the village started running away, and my son ran with them," Zubaida, 25, says. He didn't get far: Myanmar soldiers shot him dead — in the back.

That evening, the soldiers came back.

"They didn't say anything," she says. "They just came with their guns into my house."